Econsultancy released its annual Conversion Rate Optimisation Report earlier this week. The highlight? “Satisfaction with conversion rates has been on a downward trend in the last four years. Just over a fifth (22%) of companies surveyed are satisfied with their conversion rates.”

This is the usual case of a new technology over-promising and under-delivering. Conversion Rate Optimisation has been vigorously chased over the last couple of years: it clearly offers a way to boost the bottom line, not just click through rates in one’s online campaigns. The tools are improving. But we need to keep in mind that any optimisation technique is relative.

By relative, I mean it is not a gain that gets permanently locked in. It’s a process of structured experimentation to provide the most relevant and efficient path for a customer to travel. By relative, I also mean it is sensitive to the quality of the site, the quality of the traffic acquisition, as well as the rigour in which the experimentation takes place. All of which fluctuates quite regularly.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) seems to be a continually moving target as Google battles the various attempts to arbitrage it’s page ranking methods.

In June earlier this year, I poured over this excellent article from SEOMoz, “How to Perform the World’s Greatest SEO Audit”. It’s a reasonably detailed guide to establishing the health of your web pages from the perspective of a search engine and ensuring the basics are covered, and then some.

The article is broken into the following sections:
- Accessibility by search engines to your web pages;
- Indexability of the actual page html;
- Ranking Factors affected by page content;
- Ranking Factors affected by sites linking to your content and other external ‘forces’;
- Running analyses on competitors.